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Is it possible to get the name of a scala variable at runtime?
E.g. is it possible to write a function getIntVarName(variable: Int): String behaving as follows?
val myInt = 3
assert("myInt" === getIntVarName(myInt))
Basically, it can’t be done.
The JVM offers nothing by way of a Method handle (remember, Scala properties are encoded as methods in bytecode to support the uniform access principle). The closest you can get is to use reflection to find a list of methods defined on a particular class – which I appreciate doesn’t help with your particular need.
It is possible to implement this as a Scala feature, but it would require a compiler plugin to grab the relevant symbol name from the AST and push it into code as a string literal, so not something I could demonstrate in a short code snippet 🙂
The other naming problem that often comes up in reflection is method parameters. That one at least I can help with. I have a work-in-progress reflection library here that’s based on the compiler-generated scala signature as used by
scalap. It’s nowhere near being ready for serious use, but it is under active development.